Rationale
by SteamedBun
Summary: So, why exactly did Genma take Ranma on that training trip? Another view of one of the most maligned characters in Ranma 12.


Rationale

Disclaimer: Ranma 1/2 belonged to Rumiko Takahashi, but as for whose hands the license and assorted rights have ended up in, I have no idea... I just know it's not me. And the story is non profit too.

By Steamed Bun

This afternoon, I headed inside to find Ranma back home early from school. I asked for the reason, and he pushed past me muttering, with only one phrase reaching my ears.

"I wish I had never gone on that training trip."

There is no accurate way of depicting how utterly angry I was at that very moment. True, he had said it many times before, but it had always been somewhat in jest, never carrying that same weight of bitterness that it held then.

That same weight left me without breath for a moment. Couldn't he appreciate what I had done? What I had sacrificed for his gain? I had made many mistakes during those years, even I realize that, but I had never, ever considered those years of training a mistake.

What Ranma takes great pride in is his strength, his skill, his hard work that has made him into the artist he is. Most martial artists I have met share this trait, and whether or not it drives them into obtaining actual strength, it always drives them to be the best.

I lost that drive to be the best a long time ago.

They call me a lazy panda, a martial artist only because of yet unlost skill and training. But what skill and training I had gleaned from even the master! I could be so much better than these artists, with my knack for adaptation and creation.

Why then, did I not become the best? Was it simply laziness creeping up on me in my middle age?

I realized a long time ago, that I could not be trusted with power. I sealed away my forbidden techniques precisely because I knew that the temptation to use them carelessly would be too great.

So I stopped training. But I still love the art I practiced, and so I did my best to instill that in my son. My son, who I believe can be trusted with such power.

Many years ago, I sought out Happosai for training. Why I would do such a foolish thing? The full answer came to me long after we buried him. During those hellish years, I had come to deceive myself that it has him that forced me to become his student, but I remember now that I was the one to beg him for lessons even knowing of his perversions. I sought strength. Skill. And though I had the potential to grasp it like any other, I desired to make up for lost time, to gain power in a flash.

My parents, now long gone, had no skill in the art. They believed that such things were no longer necessary, and so did their best to discourage me. I never received the chance to learn the art until I reached adulthood. By then, I had seen wondrous feats, and was all too eager to learn them myself.

But I had none of the advantages of my peers, trained from childhood. I was inexperienced, lacking in the agility of my opponents, without strength and skill.

I suppose that's why I understand Akane's anger at Ranma, and at the rest of the people who entered her life. I was like that back then, and I have little doubt that Ranma would at least share some of this bitter anger were he was not as strong as he is today.

I had none of that strength when I was his age, and in this anger I sold my soul for power. I was never raised as a truly moral and honorable man, and the old man perverted what morals remained. Most of what I have done since then I detest, but those habits that he ingrained in me, that almost complete lack of concern for others, have resisted my every attempt at change.

My brief moments of lucidity have always left me with one driving motivation. To make my son strong. To keep him from making that same foolish bargain I made so many years ago.

And so I left my home, my wife, to train my son. To teach him that the only strength worth having was that which was worked for slowly. The Neko Ken, widely accepted as my worst mistake, still served a purpose, to show the price of power when foolishly grasped. Had I a chance to jump in that pit back then, I would have taken it without a qualm. But I had to teach him otherwise.

I suceeded, but in turn I had to sacrifice so much on that journey.

Ranma would probably laugh at that, saying that he had done all of the sweating, bruising, and bleeding.

But I had lost so much too. The trust, the respect of my son. And to a certain point, almost all of the parental affection he once held for me. I had to leave the wife I loved, to see in our occasional letters a slow but inexorable change to a complete stranger, one who would irrationally enforce a contract my old love had made with a laughing twinkle in her eye, sure beyond all doubt that she would never ask for our lives.

I cannot tell Ranma this, my rationale for all our suffering. He respects me too little to see my telling him as anything more than an attempt at mere leveraging in exchange for a favor.

With all these sacrifices, how could I still view the training trip as anything but dismal mistake?

I look at myself, this foolish dishonorable man, and at my son as he stomps up the stairs.

It was worth it.

* * *

AN: Thanks to Howard Russell for pointing out an enormous error, now hopefully fixed. If anyone sees anymore of them, please leave a review. 


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